


Superego

by JessenoSabaku



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Action, Aged-Up Character(s), Angst, F/F, Female Pronouns for Pidge | Katie Holt, Guilt, Guilty Shiro and Pidge, Hurt/Comfort, Near Death Experiences, Non-Canon Planet, Other, Present Tense, Self-Acceptance, Self-Hatred, Space Battles, Survivor Guilt, Work In Progress, briefly, can be read as a stand-alone
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-18
Updated: 2017-07-18
Packaged: 2018-12-03 18:14:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11537754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JessenoSabaku/pseuds/JessenoSabaku
Summary: The paladins go to scavenge resources on a new planet, where Galra are waiting to attack. A few careless mistakes leave the Lions in critical condition, and the paladins unable to form Voltron. As their chances for survival dwindle away, Pidge and the Green Lion are forced to make a choice. And as always, in the aftermath, Shiro blames himself.Pet project I've been working on for a while. Going to try and finish it, but no telling how long that will take. Please tell me what you think!





	Superego

Every skirmish with the Galra carried an unforgiving weight—the breathless exhilaration of battle, and the cold gaze of death. Pidge had stared down this two-faced challenge more times than she could count, guiding the green lion like one pilots an aircraft in a video game. There’s no other way she can endure the stress of being in the cockpit of the universe’s last hope with so little flying skill. Every battle is a trial by fire where the only option is to survive and defend the others, in the hopes they can make up for what she lacks. It’s a role she can slip into easily despite the risks. It’s as close to comfortable as she can get in such a situation. It’s how she fits into the team’s fighting dynamic, facilitating their success like a well-oiled cog in a machine. As long as she sticks to defending her teammates, most of the time she can rely on them to save the day.

This is not one of those times.

It was supposed to be a simple scouting mission of a nearby planet. Coran and Allura said it was a good candidate for extra resources, and Pidge didn’t know what “resources” they needed exactly, but when your century-old alien leaders say “jump” you jump twice without question. Allura said that the planet was pockmarked with lava deposits and volcanoes, so Pidge surmised that maybe there were more crystals there with special properties, like those back on Balmera. If there were she would like to get her hands on them.

The Galra had established a base on this planet, but it was small, and the colonization scattered. So the team sets realistic goals for the mission: everyone agrees they’ll get into the atmosphere, say “Yup, it’s a planet,” catalogue some basic features from far away and then if it’s not possible to land safely they get out. The Castle-ship would hover a safe distance away, ready to evacuate at a moment’s notice.

So they all suit up, jump into their lions, and set off. Getting into the planet’s atmosphere is easy, and from the quick scans the lions do of the ground, no soldiers seem any the wiser. In fact, there are hardly any soldiers around at all—only a few Galra camps between the wide chains of lava pockets and low-lying craters that fleck the planet’s surface.

“Seems like the gravity is pretty strong here,” Shiro announces. “Be careful.”

Pidge activates her cloaking shield and searches for a flat patch of ground far away from the closest Galra camp, surrounded by a ring of small volcanoes. She finds one, and after confirming with Shiro, is granted permission to land. She glides into a rapid descent.

Only a few moments after decreasing altitude, Pidge hears Lance’s alarmed voice on the intercom.

“What the heck is _that_ thing?” he exclaims.

Pidge pulls up instinctively, just in time to see a slender, cannon-like structure rise out of the ground a hundred yards away, girded and propped up by a web of metal beams. A bright purple light flashes in the mouth of the cannon and her blood goes cold as she realizes it’s pointed straight at her.

Comforting themselves with the idea that the Galra base was small, they had foolishly forgotten one thing: the Galra were the most technologically advanced race in the galaxy, possibly in the entire _universe_ , losing out only to the Voltron lions. The whole of Altea had crumbled beneath Zarkon’s fist, and Pidge was willing to bet he owed that victory largely to his engineers and his scientists. Engineers and scientists who probably worked and researched like their lives depended on it.

Apparently they’d worked just long enough to develop technology that could see through her cloaking device.

She pushes down on her steering modules as hard as she can, begging Green to pull up. With such a huge, clunky cannon like that, as long as she acts fast, she should be able to dodge. But the drag of the planet’s strong gravity costs her two precious seconds she couldn’t afford. While fighting her own momentum she pulls up directly into the blast.

Her head snaps back against the seat so hard that her vision goes black for a moment. When color comes back, everything is spiraling, mixing up her stomach and intestines until her insides run together. A weight in her head continuously spins as she does and brings a white-hot rush to her forehead. She blinks away the darkness to find the control panel going crazy, her visual display cracking in and out of lime-green static, and the blood-chilling realization that _she can’t feel Green at all_. She desperately pulls at the controls, but all movement is locked up.

A flash of yellow passes her window and then something slams into the left side of her lion. She scrambles to hold on, helplessly watching the world spin behind her crackling display until Green hits the ground. They skid for what feels like forever, metal screaming in Pidge’s ear until they finally come to an abrupt halt. She sits motionless, chest heaving and fingers clenched so tightly her joints burn, but at least her kidneys aren’t communing with her lungs anymore. The ringing in her ears is so loud she has trouble remembering how to breathe. When the first shred of clarity returns, she calls out to Green in her mind. She calls over and over again, but there’s no answer.

Outside, the yellow lion lands, galloping toward her in panic. Hunk is shouting her name over the com-link, his voice cutting in and out. Any response she could give is arrested by the shocking absence of Green. She’d gotten comfortable with having two voices in her head, and had almost forgotten a few terrifying feelings. Forgotten the isolation, every hyper-aware muscle pulsing and stretching with each breath, the prick of so many single strands of hair brushing her own face. She finds it too easy to focus. The Galra cannon fires in the distance, and shots whizz back in return.

And then, everything crackles back to life. The steering modules unlock, the display clears up, and Green reappears as a dim thrum in Pidge’s whole body, as if lethargically recovering from a brief sleep.

Pidge closes her eyes and leans back, the sweat on her body cooling down. “Thank God.”

“Hey! I heard that!” Hunk cries out. “Why aren’t you answering? You okay in there?”

“Yes. Yes,” Pidge breathes out, grip on the controls relaxing as Green’s presence curls warmly back into her forehead and chest. “We’re okay. Was that you who crashed into me?”

“Yeah, sorry. You were headed straight for a lava crater—I had to do something.”

She takes in a deep breath and rights her lion onto its feet. Green isn’t doing so hot, stepping forward with jerky movements. But she’s functional, she’s back, and that’s all that counts.

“I owe you,” Pidge says to Hunk, a bead of sweat rolling down her cheek to her chin. “What about the others?”

As if on cue, Lance’s voice cuts through, “I’m hit! Crap—what is—here?! I can’t—Blue—”

Pidge looks up and sees the blue lion spiraling out of the sky, much like she had been a few moments before. He recovers within a few seconds, so he must not have taken a direct hit.

“We gotta help him,” Hunk says, and he doesn’t need to tell Pidge twice. They take to the skies, the yellow lion pulling ahead while Pidge struggles to get her thrusters up to maximum capacity, or even seventy-five percent. She’d heartily accept seventy-five percent.

“Something’s wrong. Green’s not responding well,” Pidge warns Hunk as she pulls up to his rear. Looks like Lance is having similar luck, from the way Blue stutters through the sky in an attempt to avoid another cannon blast. As Hunk and Pidge draw closer, Pidge sees that the cannon emerged from underground, hidden beneath two large plates mounted with fake terrain. She can’t believe that such an elementary setup managed to fool them. Maybe the Galra had managed to develop other cloaking systems that could rival Pidge’s.

Before they can reach Lance, they see Voltron’s resident ace pilot in the distance, zipping past Lance and going for a full-frontal confrontation with the cannon. Lance is screaming nonsense into the intercom, cutting in and out, and it’s Hunk who manages to put the distress into words, shouting “Keith, get out of there, what are you doing?!”

“If I can take out the support beams, that cannon’s finished!” Keith yells back, not at all willing to back down.

Shiro’s voice takes over now, loud and urgent, “Stand down! We need to retreat—you and Lance turn around and regroup, we’re getting out of here!”

But when Keith gets like this, no amount of reason can reach him. Pidge watches in horror as the red lion dives towards the cannon, fearlessly darting around a bright purple blast that shoots out faster than she can blink. Everyone is shouting at him, herself included. She presses on the thrusters harder than she ought to and they cut out altogether, along with all power, and for the second time she starts falling. After a few moments, power flickers back on again, and she pulls back up to Hunk’s rear before anyone notices.

“Keith, listen, you have to stop!” she pleads, “I don’t know what’s up with that cannon but it cut my connection to Green! You can’t afford a direct hit!”

“Then I won’t get hit,” came the infuriating reply. She watched the red lion dodge another lethal shot with no sign of abandoning its self-ordained mission.

“No, you don’t understand,” Shiro says urgently, “it’s not just the cannon—”

Then Pidge looks to her left and sees the reason they need to retreat. Plate-like false terrain begins to slide open, opening up several black pits. Out of the darkness, small Galra ships are rising. Agile ships. Agile enough that they’re going to make life suck really hard for the entire Voltron team in less than five seconds.

“Shit,” Pidge curses under her breath.

“I’m gonna help Keith,” Hunk announces, resigned to their teammate’s reckless behavior. 

“Lance and I will back you up,” Shiro cuts in. “Pidge, hang back and protect the Castle-ship. If Green’s having trouble, I don’t want you out where you can get caught in the crossfire.”

She was all too happy to comply. If pushing the thrusters was enough to make Green short out, she’d get in the way by sticking around. She changed course for the Castle-ship, passing right by the black lion on her way.

It takes her only ten seconds to get back within range of the Castle-ship, where it just barely breaches the atmosphere. She hears a few loud booms in the distance, and the sound of metal giving way with a screaming lurch. She turns Green around to see that part of the lattice of support beams on the cannon’s left side has been burned through. The yellow lion shoots a volley of lasers at the right side, just enough to bend the beams so that the whole structure falls in on itself. Seeing that their job is done, Hunk and Keith fly away while Shiro and Lance provide cover fire.

The cannon tilts dangerously, falling through the air in slow-motion, mouth lighting up one last time. And Keith, the damn fool, pulls up into the air to engage an incoming Galra ship instead of staying low to the ground. He puts himself right in the path of the cannon’s final shot.

The blast only glances against his side, but it’s enough to send him flying. Pidge can see him struggling to regain control, see it in the way Red flexes and kicks at the air, but she can still hear him clearly, so she knows he was lucky enough to escape a disconnect with Red. But now he’s hurtling for the ground, with three encroaching Galra ships, and Shiro is busy holding off at least five more by himself while sustaining heavy fire. Lance and Hunk both rush to Keith’s aid—Hunk physically knocking Keith back into the air, like he did with Pidge, and Lance managing to take out two ships before the third hits him with a shot that has his com link crackling again.

“I’m trying—use my freezy-thing,” he says, “my ice—but it won’t work. Keith, try—fire beam again!”

A pause, and then, “I’m trying. It won’t work. It’s like Red’s not even registering my commands.”

Pidge can’t believe her eyes. In the course of ten seconds, the entire flow of the battle has changed. They warned students about this back at the academy, that in the blink of an eye even a simple delivery could end in fireworks. But that was when Pidge wasn’t flying a Voltron lion, the pinnacle of scientific progress. One of the most powerful weapons in the universe. It shouldn’t be possible for ships so small to juggle four lions, but it’s happening right in front of her eyes. They swarm her friends like flies, chewing away at their defenses and effortlessly avoiding every shot.

She should be down there. She should be helping them. They should be forming Voltron right now, or at least trying to, but Shiro said she should stay back. And she realizes he’s right when a deafening whir comes from the Castle-ship behind her. The Castle is charging up for an attack, its surface awash with blue light.

“Everyone, look out,” Allura commands, “cover fire headed your way! Coran, on my mark— _now_!”

A hailstorm of lasers pour out, immediately drawing all Galra attention to the Castle-ship. About a third of the attacking ships drop out of the sky, spiraling to the ground or into lava pockets. Half the remaining ships—about twenty of them—slip away from Shiro and the others, and rush madly for the Castle. The other half stay behind to run interference with the rest of the paladins.

Twenty of them. Pidge can’t fucking take twenty ships. She can barely get up to the speed necessary to fight these guys. But she can see Shiro and the others poised to intercept from the rear, in the perfect position to back her up.

She grips the steering column hard. “Don’t chicken out now. They’re depending on you.”

If she dives into the middle of them, they will scatter and fly straight past her towards the Castle. So she pushes her thrusters as hard as they can go without cutting out and circles around the ships in a wide arc, then cuts a diagonal path up towards the ship farthest away from the Castle. A few well-placed shots send it hurtling out of the sky. Two ships turn back to engage her—she ducks in between them, flies upside down, and opens fire. One goes down, and the other manages to escape only to be intercepted by Shiro, the first to make it back to support Pidge. 

The yellow lion crushes one of the ship’s wings in its jagged, flat-toothed maw.

“I’m going in,” Hunk tells her. “Cover me.”

Through their combined efforts, they pare the seventeen remaining ships down to ten just before they scatter their formation. But luckily, the Galra scatter away from the Castle-ship, falling back just enough to keep a safe distance from the paladins, but still too close to the Castle for comfort.

“There’s too many for us to handle. I’m dead weight right now,” Pidge informs everyone. “I’m pushing Green as hard as I can, but I don’t know how much more she can take.”

Lance responds breathlessly, “Me too. I’m a few hits away from taking a lava bath.”

“Then let’s all regroup,” Shiro orders. “Allura, Coran, you ready to get out of here?”

“Ready whenever you are. Once we get out of the atmosphere we can open a wormhole. You’ll have to dock before we enter it. We can’t risk your lions falling apart in the wormhole. Lance, you go first.”

“What about Keith?” Lance protests. “He got hit too!”

“He’ll be okay. Probably,” Coran assures them firmly.

“Probably?” Keith asks, for once sounding a little concerned for himself.

“Prepare to dock,” Allura commands in that voice that leaves no room for argument. “We’re dropping the shields, so get in quick.”

The blue lion quickly glides back to the Castle under cover fire from the other paladins. As the ship is opening its bay to receive the lion, Pidge sees another cannon, slightly smaller than the first, slowly rise out of synthetic terrain plating below them.

“You’ve got to be _kidding me_ ,” she curses. The cannon adjusts and takes aim not at the paladins, but at the Castle ship.

Keith’s voice is blaring over the intercom, “Allura! Coran! You’ve got fire!”

The docking process finishes and they get the shields online just in time to bear the brunt of the blast. The blue panels flicker, surviving the hit, but the shields are already suffering big time. Her suspicion is confirmed when Coran yells, “We can’t take another direct hit like that! We have to leave _now_!”

Allura’s voice is frantic static in Pidge’s ears. “But we have to get the shields down so they can dock—their lions won’t make it—“

“There’s no time! What can we do?”

“Don’t worry about me. I’ll take my chances on the wormhole,” Keith shouts bravely, already drifting up toward the Castle. “Just get Pidge in the ship and—“

“Incoming!” Shiro warns, and then the cannon fires again, completely obliterating the Castle’s shields in a burst of blue glass-like shards.

“Fuck this, I’m coming back out and we’re going Voltron on all of these guys,” Lance declares emphatically.

“Can we even form Voltron like this?” Pidge asks.

“We have to try--!”

Coran is arguing now, “We don’t have time, we have to move now!” and Allura is insisting, “Maybe Lance is right. Get back out there, we’ll provide cover fire from the Castle.”

Some half-formed protest is wrangling its way out of Hunk’s throat, and Keith is shouting back, “No, let’s just go! If we lose the Castle, we can’t get out of here! I’ll buy us a few seconds, so get Pidge docked, and then we’re gone.”

“Keith, no,” Shiro orders, but it’s too late. Keith is already swooping in on the Galra units still in the sky, his usually-graceful maneuvers upset with clumsy jerks. Already, Hunk and Shiro are pulling around to come to his aid. The latter is thwarted by a few ships that dance past both Keith and Hunk, heading straight for the vulnerable Castle. Pidge can see the ship bay opening up again, the blue lion waiting to be released.

The world falls away and all sound fades into silence. They’re not going to make it. They’ll never get out of the atmosphere before that cannon strikes again. Even if Keith pulls up with all his might and returns to the Castle-ship, he’ll never make it back in time for everyone to escape. And because of his mad dive into the middle of the fray, all fire immediately focused on him. Ace pilot or not, he can’t dodge everything. And if he gets hit, if he goes down, she doesn’t know how his lion can even _get_ to a wormhole, much less survive it.

Amidst the conflicting signals coming from rapid calculation and pilot’s instinct, one thought flashes through her mind just long enough to completely possess her:

“He’s going to die. They’re all going to die.”

It shouldn’t be possible. All common sense, all knowledge of the true power of the Voltron lions, all faith in hyper-advanced Altean technology tells her that they won’t die here, it’s _impossible_ for them to die here. But a defender of the universe has to keep somewhat in touch with reality, and the reality of the situation is that Keith is hurtling towards a swarm of Galra and an unknown weapon that can knock him right out of the sky. Even if he doesn’t get hit, then it’ll be one of the others, or the Castle-ship sustaining the cannon-fire. And if one of them goes down, if only one of the paladins die, the universe is doomed.

Pidge’s lion still won’t respond like usual—she can feel the sensitive balance with each tug of her steering column. The reality of the situation is sinking in, no matter how she tries to fight it, and the thought bubbles up again with all the force of fact, “They’re going to die.”

Their voices echo in her ears: Keith’s primal screams of adrenaline, Shirou’s unheeded orders to retreat, Hunk promising backup he can’t give, and she can see their faces without looking. She sees Lance, clear as day, clutching Blue’s controls as he dives back out into danger. Even while wearing a distressed expression, he was pretty as a picture, all olive-brown skin and always hopeful. She sees Allura and Coran, struggling to provide cover fire, putting the paladins’ lives over their own. She sees it all in a gunshot of emotion, and knows she can’t leave their fates up to common sense and faith in Altean technology. 

She wants to ask how Green feels, to ask permission, but she doesn’t have to. She can feel the vibration of Green’s thoughts down to the tips of her fingers, reverberating through her knuckle bones. Pidge has never known Green to feel fear, but the intense sadness she shares with Pidge in the moment bears a frightening resemblance. The weight of panic fills her chest. She knows she can’t do anything. She knows that. 

A part of herself she’d forgotten, stalwart defender and veiled threat of the past, rises up like bile and mouths inside her throat, ‘Don’t do it.’

She swallows it down, but it returns like a grudge to issue more commands. ‘Take your hands off the controls,’ it says, ‘this isn’t your fight.’

She says aloud, “Isn’t it?”

To which it responds heatedly, ‘Have you already forgotten?’

And then she sees it. In the display, her own reflection, from a time when she had no glasses and she still had the long hair that distinguished her from her brother. Back then, the universe meant nothing. She looks into that girl’s eyes now and sees how many light years separate the two of them. She sees the anger, the hurt, and the sadness, and realizes just how long her heart had spent muffled in protective cotton. 

In the split second she realizes it, those emotions seep back in like coffee spilled on the morning of that news report that changed her life forever.

She has never seen someone with so much hate in their eyes before. The girl in the display claws at the screen between them. And she says again, ‘Don’t do it. You’re going to die. And if you die, they die too.’

A mixture of molten shame, anger, and fear creeps up the back of her throat. She has no words to defend herself. She hadn’t even thought about _them_. Hadn’t thought about them in more than passing, or on nights of melancholic introspection, or when a new possible lead arose. The choking urgency from those days in the Garrison are gone. The despair it morphed into is buried under the weight of a second heart.

The guilt isn’t enough to pull her hands from the controls. A flex of her fingers is all it takes to draw out a scream from the display, filled with grit.

The entire screen vanishes and all lights flicker off. Pidge lets out a pathetic squeak, afraid Green has malfunctioned again. Then she realizes with a rush of relief that Green is still the weight in her chest, the thick layer of felt in her forehead. She feels that layer of felt grow, wrap around her entire skull, and all sound falls away except the noiseless hum that’s been with her ever since she found her lion in that forest.

Green pours everything into her with the force of a waterfall, until every emotion expands and collapses and swallows itself up. Nothing is left but peace, memories, and the knowledge that Green is there. That Green has always been there. Been there since before they ever met, and she just didn’t know.

She has no idea what to do. The display won’t come back, and she doesn’t want it to, but without it her control is limited. That second, ever-dependable presence in her head tells her to move forward anyway. She leans her entire weight into pushing the steering modules forward. She pushes the thrusters as hard as they can go, and Green stutters but does not fail. She sees the ground and pockets of lava fly by outside the window. The lack of proper visuals is so disorienting she has to close her eyes for a moment.

The com link crackles to life with Shiro’s voice, shouting “what are you doing,” and she doesn’t know—her hands are moving on their own, all according to the command of the voice in her head. There’s no room left for the fear, only a forged tranquility. The voice repeats bad puns Lance has dropped at the dinner table, recounts all the times Pidge ran into Keith in the middle of the night on his way back from the training room. Pidge relives all the smiles and shoulder brushes, and how much her personal bubble shrank since they all became Voltron. The voice, the voice, the voice, dredges up memories while sliding through her veins like thick, heady mercury, guiding her movements. Pidge had no idea what she was doing or how she was doing it—but outside her window she sees ships dropping like flies. Wooden roots burst out from the mouth of the cannon, blocking any further fire. Finally, finally Keith’s fire beam comes online again. He works on burning the support structure keeping the cannon aloft. 

In her mind flashes the image of a girl she’d never seen before, suited up much like she is, leaning forward limply in Green’s cockpit. Low-level fear, quiet and dark, sweeps through her and the image is replaced with happier ones. Too late Pidge realizes that had been one of Green’s memories. The engine struggles and sputters. The sound of enemy blasters cuts through the thick felt in her head and she sees two more Galra ships go down. The com link is blaring distantly with muffled words. She feels a small spark of hope in her tight chest.

“Green,” Pidge gasps painfully, weighed down by Green’s exertion. The voice falls silent, for a moment. And then—

_you made this decision_

Pidge chokes out, “Green, you don’t have to—”

_protect it_

This was not a command. It was an oath.

The shouting in the background came out clearer now, drawing Pidge’s attention. Allura saying, “All the enemy ships have been destroyed! Come back and dock _now_!”

Keith’s breathless voice cut her off, “Pidge, how did you do that?” She vaguely hears Shiro demand a status report from her. All she can do is stare blindly at the ceiling inside of Green with a stone in the pit of her stomach. Her chest fills with weak warmth again before the weight lifts and the felt unravels. Green’s voice is gone.

The green lion begins to drop out of the sky. The bright orange glow of a lava pocket below shines into the cockpit, leaving a stunned Pidge to face harsh reality alone. She’s headed straight for it.

“Someone help her!” Lance shrieks over the com-link.

Hunk responds urgently, “I’m not fast enough! Keith, you’re the closest—”

“I can’t get the thrusters to respond!” Keith cries out, and Pidge can hear the furious clack of his controls. “Shiro—”

“I’m already on it. Just hang on, Pidge,” Shiro says, calm and firm as ever but she could swear she heard his voice quaver.

She licks her lips, still in shock. “Roger. Currently hanging. Like a koala on a tree in a windstorm.”

“If you’re alright, _say_ it,” Hunk groans in exasperation, “We were calling you for hours!”

“Not hours,” she corrects weakly.

“If she has the energy to be that obnoxious, she must be fine,” Lance chips in, overcome with relief.

The maw of the lava pocket looms before her. She hears Keith and Lance fall into some blithering, nonsensical argument, and wishes desperately she could concentrate on what they’re saying.

“Hey guys,” she interrupts, and all talking stops. “Things aren’t looking good right now. I’ve got maybe a good fifteen seconds before I hit this thing.”

“You’re not going to hit it,” Shiro declares, but he’s wavering again. It’s that moment of weakness that finally gets the adrenaline pumping.

“Yeah. Of course. It’s just,” Pidge starts, breath coming faster as a wall of heat rolls over the cockpit, “When’s the next chance I’ll get to say something cool, you know? I just …”

She watches a wave of lava spurt out and curl over itself in a yellow and orange burst. Impulsive recollection of excerpts she read on the geological phenomena of volcanoes, practical and succinct in the wording, sobers her up to the point where she can’t even joke anymore. The echoes of what Green said to her won’t go away.

Protect it.

She stares into the crater like she stared into Matt’s back when he left for the Kerberos mission.

“When you look back on this moment, I want you to remember,” Pidge whispers, lips still dry with loneliness, “I chose all of you. Over my brother, my dad, everybody in this entire universe. _We_ chose you--both me and Green.”

“Hurry up, Shiro!” Hunk presses in alarm. 

“I’m going as fast as I can!”

Pidge is only a hundred feet away from burning lava. With Green offline and unable to stabilize core temperature, the cockpit is already cooking. She’ll be fried from heat long before the lava reaches her. She sucks in rapid breaths, unable to push back the dread long enough to say a single word more. 

Her eyes screw shut as she focuses every ounce of her soul into a bleak point outside herself, desperately searching the miasmatic universe for a trace of Green, who brought a candle into the lonely dark. She took that kindness for granted. The com-link is filled with screams again, reminding her that no matter how lonely it feels, she’s not alone.

Her lion plunges into the lava.


End file.
